The Third Treasure
by Tammany Tiger
Summary: Relationship, character study. Sherlock and Lestrade. Perfectly safe for work, perfectly focused on basic friendship between two remarkably complex characters.


**Relationship piece: Sherlock and Lestrade. , not slash. No, that's not a moral statement, just prosaic fact. This one's basic friendship, and Sherlock, that supremely difficult man to befriend, deliberating over his discovery of a friend he hadn't known he'd come to love. Mostly post-Reichebach, slightly post-return.**

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**The Third Treasure**

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Molly, of course, had slid under the radar for all of them—even under Sherlock's radar. She was the fourth treasure, the one no one had noticed. The one he had been completely sure Moriarty had missed, just as he'd missed Mycroft. An ally Moriarty would never register.

She was simple in her invisibility.

After the fall, in the months to come, Sherlock sometimes pondered her invisibility and his own near-failure to recognize the obvious: that he liked her. That he'd have grieved if she'd been targeted. That Moriarty could have used her against him, rather than the other way around. Even in retrospect he found himself slightly bewildered that he'd missed her significance in his life, peculiar and peripheral though it was. It wasn't like a fish becoming aware of water, or current, or any of the clichéd things people regularly cited as things fish were too engulfed by to be aware of. No—she was like the not-clichéd things fish ought to be aware of, but were not unusual in failing to realize. The pleasure of ripple-shadow on a sandy bottom, for example. The good feeling of turning on a dime to race after minnows.

Molly, then, was a precious grace note he'd come perilously close to undervaluing. A silver coin almost lost in the shadows of Sherlock's near-empty treasure chest. He was not a man so wealthy in love that he could afford to miss even that shining sterling shilling, though.

There was Mycroft, of course, but Mycroft was almost more the treasure chest itself. Mycroft defined treasure in Sherlock's life. Mycroft actually was the fish's cliché—the water he could barely stand to notice, because Mycroft enveloped him, ensured his survival, Mycroft was his breath, his blood, his life, his brother, his keeper, the one enemy he could count on to battle shadows beside him, the unfallen angel to his devil, the paladin to his dragon. It was no wonder Moriarty had failed to understand Mycroft and Sherlock—in their binary orbit around each other they were not antagonists in any normal sense, but mere polarities, utterly defined by each other in so many ways. To challenge the existence of one challenged the existence of both, and if you threatened one, both would turn together to wage bloody war before turning back to their silent spin, struggling to remain together, struggling to fly apart. They were a physics formula, they were subatomic particles in balance, they were Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes.

Poor Moriarty, missing the significance of the great and the small. The great striding fugue and the high treble grace note that rose above it. The treasure chest and the shilling.

The middle, though: the three great treasures. Moriarty had spotted those. Spotted them, perhaps, even more clearly than Sherlock had.

John? Of course, John. Moriarty had spotted John already, back during the Great Game. There had never been any question that John was a hostage to fortune, the jewel in the crown. Never any question that he would die for Sherlock, and Sherlock would die to protect him from that fate, whether John chose the sacrifice himself or someone like Moriarty imposed it. Sherlock and Mycroft had planned for that. If it had been John alone, John would have lived without the fall being needed. If, on the roof, Moriarty had merely said, "Your friend will die," and Sherlock had said, "John?" and Moriarty had smirked and said, "Yes. If you don't jump John will die," Sherlock would have gleefully dangled the man over the edge of St. Barts until Mycroft's people had arrived, teasing him with questions and smirking in the knowledge that John was watched over. That assassin would have failed.

But Moriarty had said, "All of them," and Sherlock had known that there were assassins he and Mycroft had not thought to guard against.

Mrs. Hudson had been obvious, too, once he thought of it. Oh, she'd surprised him back during the case with Irene Adler. He'd honestly not known until the CIA agent had attacked her and held her captive that she was one of his treasures, too. One more challenge to years of assuring himself he was immune to simple affection…instead, there was a little Cockney sparrow who'd crept into the heart he'd once thought he didn't have. It wasn't even a surprise Moriarty had caught on. By the end word had to have slipped out. Someone had to have mentioned his vengeance on the CIA leader. Someone had to have noted Mrs. Hudson's place in John's blog. Someone would know. Still, when he'd named her on the roof, and seen the flicker of satisfied glee in Moriarty's eye, he'd felt the fear. It would have been so much better if it had only been John.

They'd been so prepared for it to be only John—John who'd been used once that way by Moriarty already. So much simpler. Still, Mrs. Hudson hadn't been forgotten, if only because the flat itself was protected. She would have lived…she almost certainly would have lived. Not quite certainly, but enough for Sherlock to gamble on when the stakes were so very high. He still might have refused Moriarty the game, knowing he'd spotted Mrs. Hudson.

But the bastard had made it clear there was one more jewel at risk. One more gamble to make. One more treasure for Sherlock to lose—and that was the one treasure he'd entirely failed to count...or at least, to count properly. Too visible to use as he'd used Molly, but not someone he'd actually expected Moriarty to threaten. Sherlock had said, "Mrs. Hudson," fully expecting the tally to stop there. Instead, Moriarty had gloated, "All of them," suggesting still more.

Sherlock had named Lestrade out of pure logic, not sentiment. Who was left, after all? Moriarty would hardly target Donovan and Anderson… there was too much chance Sherlock would simply thank him for the favor of taking them down. Molly and Mycroft Sherlock would only name at the very last, if forced to, refusing to give Moriarty any clue of the resources he'd missed. Lestrade was all that was logically left, and Sherlock actually gloated for one shimmering fraction of a second before saying the name. For that one brief second he'd thought that he could sacrifice that pawn if he had to. John was covered. Mrs. Hudson less so, but she was still under Mycroft's vast umbrella of security precautions. That left only Lestrade as a true lever against Sherlock…and, well, Lestrade! Surely a misstep on Moriarty's part?

Then Sherlock heard his own voice shake as he said the name, and felt the bite of fear…deeper fear than John and Mrs. Hudson had called up, because with Lestrade the risk was completely real, and completely outside Mycroft and Sherlock's planning. Like Molly, he'd slipped in without Sherlock noticing his heart had been occupied.

The rest of the battle on the roof would have gone the same regardless. The battle between Moriarty and Sherlock, the game of wit and will would not have changed. Even the jump—Sherlock would have jumped, knowing it was rigged, that it protected all his precious friends even more completely than Mycroft's security agents could. Assassins are hard to stop—and Sherlock and Mycroft had need for Sherlock's apparent death.

What had changed was Sherlock's awareness of the risks involved.

The haunted him over the months to come. A year and a half of solitude to think about it.

Molly—bright little Molly, the first surprise, the first revelation of the Fall, as aware as a mouse in the wainscoting, seeing everything. John, Sherlock's soldier, valiant and loyal and straightforward and true. Mrs. Hudson, with all her warmth and laughter and incomprehensible kindness.

And Lestrade, the second surprise, the third treasure.

Night after night Sherlock walked his mind around the images floating in his mind palace, trying to determine when Lestrade had become someone he would not willingly live without. The early years? No. No, not when he'd fought with the drugs, fought with Mycroft, fought—oh, God, fought—with Lestrade himself, frantic because he needed the man for cases, but yearned to stab at him the same way he stabbed at Mycroft, and for many of the same reasons. Lestrade could have been his brother—but he already had one brother he needed, heart and soul and body and spirit. He would not have let Lestrade into his heart then.

Would he?

Not in the middle years, when they'd reached an uneasy accord, when he'd solved Lestrade's cases and congratulated himself on his own prowess and gloated over Lestrade's need of him, refusing to accept that what Lestrade needed was not Sherlock Holmes, as such, but criminals in jail where they couldn't hurt anyone again. He needed kidnap victims in their own homes. He needed rapists caught. He needed to know the streets were one little bit safer, and if he had to set his own reputation and his own ego aside to ensure that—if he had to let Sherlock Holmes rip at him and his team and strut like a territorial tomcat over all his crime sites—he'd do it. He'd endure it... and, insanely, out of the kindness of his own heart, he'd even find it in him to care about Sherlock. Lestrade couldn't have crept into Sherlock's heart then. Of course not. Sherlock had no heart, then, only the glorious rush of victory, the proof of his own talent, the victory over lesser men. He wouldn't have let one of those lesser men in then, would he?

Would he?

And not after John's arrival. Certainly not then, when John filled the horizons of Sherlock's affection from East to West. What need would he have had for a man who, while admittedly among the best the Yard had to offer, wasn't _John?_

It was months before he realized that Lestrade could have been his John-perhaps even prepared the way for John. That he could have been his Mycroft on a human scale-and maybe was that merely human brother.

Seven years Sherlock had known the man without ever knowing his first name. Seven years he'd distrusted his ties to Mycroft. Seven years he'd resented his right to keep Sherlock away from cases, control his access and his decisions. Seven years. Seven years of caution and competition and resentment and wary partnership. The memories he had of Lestrade should have been composed of anger and vicious carping on both sides and nothing more.

Instead he walked around the images, drew them up, pushed them away, astounded at what he found that he'd never chosen to forget. His rival, the man who controlled his cases, the man he insulted over and over, lifting his head as Sherlock approached a crime site, and smiling welcome.

A real smile. Real welcome.

A hand on his shoulder when he needed support. A man at his back when danger came too close. Sharp quips with sting—but without malice. Quick to anger, quick to forgive, slow—so very slow—to betray his consultant. A cup of coffee brought to him on a cold wet night over a particularly puzzling corpse. Somewhere in the tension and the work, in the bickering and the victories, the man whose name he'd failed to learn had nonetheless marked Sherlock to the very soul, and become another brother, another friend.

The third treasure in his chest. The third jewel in his crown. The third need in his life. The third sacrifice he could not willingly make.

When Sherlock came back, when he walked into the cold concrete car park, when he saw Lestrade waiting in the shadows patting his coat as though looking for a pack of cigarettes, when Lestrade's head swung around at the sound of Sherlock's footsteps, when his face lit up, when the welcome beat the anger and the loss and the years apart to his eyes…

Sherlock knew, then, that it didn't matter when Greg Lestrade had become his third hostage to fortune. It only mattered that in becoming such a hostage, he, like Mycroft and Molly, like John and Mrs. Hudson, had made Sherlock the wealthiest of men.


End file.
